Kinetic Cipher Questions

Today some nice fan left a few questions about the plot of my old RPGMaker game, Kinetic Cipher. I worked on that game for about five years and never finished it. Since it’s a dead project, I see no harm in answering those questions now.

1. Who is the final boss of the game?

Erin, Karen and Nero’s guildmate from the first few scenes of the game. The backstory gets a little too complicated to summarize in this short space, but it boils down to: an evil monster was planning to possess Karen’s mind when they were both girls, so Erin killed the monster to protect her, and part of the monster took root in Erin’s mind instead.

My buddy Holbert always used to pick on me for how close the plot and theming of KC drove to Star Wars, so he’d get a kick out of learning this, because in retrospect the end of the game would have been a very Luke-and-Darth-Vader moment.

2. What was the final uber-dungeon going to be?

The Quevari Realm is that crystalline world parallel to the real one. Eventually the party would have been able to use it as a sort of quick-travel system, like the Nether in Minecraft. In the middle of the Quevari Realm is a sealed hole leading to an ancient, Lovecraftian dimension of untold horror etc. The idea was that the quevari seeped through the cracks in this hole and into the real world, where people harnessed their energy to power psionics. Grandmaster ciphers called the seal over this hole “The Veil”, and so the final dungeon was going to be “Beyond the Veil”.

As for how that dungeon was supposed to be structured, it was so far away that I hadn’t put much thought into it yet. One idea I had was to make it like the Rift from Final Fantasy V, where it used bite-sized chunks and combinations of old dungeons. I probably would have invented something new for it instead, though.

3. What is the background of Insandru?

He doesn’t really have one. Insandru was a red herring, and not the story’s true villain. His deal was, as a tatheril, he knew of ways to use the quevari to build material weapons rather than to fuel magic powers. The bomb he used to blow up Darmenia was such a weapon, as was the device he used to erase Karen’s defenses in the opening scene. Eventually Insandru recruits Cor and Erin to his cause, but they each had their own goals outside of “help Insandru” and were independently planning to double-cross him and neutralize him as a threat.

He doesn’t really need a backstory to fulfill his role in the plot, but if I had to put a pin in it I would just say “he’s some terrible guy who wants to control people because that is what terrible guys want.”

3 comments to Kinetic Cipher Questions

So Erin was being driven more by the monster in her mind than by her training in psionics which made her heartless and a fully logical person? Wow, I didn’t expect that twist with her and Karen. I really like tragic endings.

Insandru blew up Darmenia on purpose just because they didn’t want to transport his things through the woods? Or did someone tamper with the bomb and made it explode? Since he’s just a terrible guy, I believe it’s the first lol

Oh, you sparkled my curiosity even more!
Now I can only phantasize about how things would play out after Khalisto.

Brickroad, you’ll be haunted by KC fans forever hahaha
Thank you for your brilliant game, to this day it’s still on my top 3 best RPG Maker games ever (both versions).

Are there working downloads anywhere for either of the two releases of Kinetic Cipher?

I decided to make an RPG, played some sloppy and/or unfinished games, started looking for info on how to make a tighter game, founds some helpful articles by Brickroad, started looking for his games, read KC was one of the best RPG Maker games, and then can’t find a working link ANYWHERE.